Excerpt from Major John Andre as a Prisoner of War at Lancaster, Pa., 1775-6: With Some Account of a Historic House and Family
In a notable passage of one of the finest outbursts of modern oratory, a great man, on a great occasion, stand ing in a great place, suggested that while it recked little what he and his colleagues said, where they then stood, the world could never forget what had been done there. This linking of event with locality is one of the fine traits of human thought. Nothing has con tributed more to history in its best and broadest significance than the reverent tendency to associate the thing done with the place where it happened. Hawthorne somewhere points out that it is not only the physical perfection of the English landscape rolled and combed, fin ished with a pencil rather than a plow, but the wealth of its historical and personal associations that so charms the tourist on that sacred soil. In fact, very much of the pleasure, if not the profit, of travel lies in the con stant suggestiveness of historical as sociation; and over and over again places inethemselves altogether com mon, if not mean, take on a signifi cance and importance that challenge the interest and charm the memory of the beholder because of the deeds long done or the persons long dead with which or with whom they are somehow related.
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